Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina
Upper Oso Reservoir: The Boyscout Lake. A quarter by half-mile hole in the California hills. Save for the scout’s bungalows along the south bank, a boat launch in the east creek, and a fifty-foot dam west towards the 241 freeway, it was utterly impenetrable; surrounded by barbed wire and thick scrub brush; completely unfishable. Just making it to the water was a thirty-minute hike through a hole in the back fence, dodging scout leaders and security cameras, hoping not to step on a rattlesnake. Oso was the kind of lake everybody had heard of and few talked about. It began with the old timers, who bragged about having fished it ‘back in the day’ when it was still public. They whispered its name at trade shows, on the dock, and in gaggles in theback of local tackle shops. They whispered it while driving by on the freeway to Diamond Valley, where nobody heard. And they blabbed about it on local podcasts, when they were too drunk to care, and where groms from every neighborhood skatepark and Chronic Tacos in the county tuned in. Soon, everybody knew its name. It was “The Boyscout Lake” to the old timers. It was “Upper Oso Reservoir'' to the groms. But to me, it was always just Oso.
In the generation post what the old timers called ‘the good ole days’, Oso was the last remaining lake in Southern California to stock trout, and therefore the last lake with the ability to grow a world record bass. It might as well have been the last lake standing. You see, big bass need big food. The smaller ones can live on pretty much anything: baitfish, crawdads, etc. But the big ones are too large to waste their energy chasing down smaller prey items. They need something slower and more substantial. That’s where the trout come in. They’re funneled out of the back of a truck and into the water, dumb, clueless, having been raised in a tank and with no natural protections (The old timers will tell you stories about how bass used to literally sit underneath that funnel and gulp trout up by one). And nowhere else, other than Southern California, did bass have access to such easy, hatchery-borne food. This combined with the comfortable winters, allowed our largemouth to reach record proportions.
A whole subculture developed around their pursuit, a technique called swimbait fishing. Swimbait fishing’s not your typical bobber and worm, waiting and baiting, wait-all-day, jack-off, and drink a beer in your fold up chair type of shit. It’s not at all relaxing like that. Every cast is different, and you’re constantly on the move to the next spot. You’ve gotta know the wind, the season, that point on that one side of the lake, the way your Slammer (specifically your M.S. Slammer) hits the water, and the shadow it casts against the bank line. Angles are everything. The baits are 10-12 inches long. They’re hand carved in wood, imported from Japan, and cost a couple hundred dollars a piece (you’ve gotta be willing to go swimming if you get one snagged). But they catch the biggest bass in the world by imitating their favorite food. They catch the trout eaters.
Around 2011, the state realized that the trout they were stocking (which were supposed to be for all the barbie-poll no-ideas-what-they’re doing weekend fisher-kooks) were being eaten by the bass before anybody could catch them. It took the state thirty years to realize what the swimbaiters knew all along. So they cut off the trout stocks, and all the big bass starved off. And ever since then it hadn’t been the same, but for Oso. Oso still stocked for the boyscouts. Everybody knew it. Few had the balls.
In April, fog rolls in high from the ocean and settles inland against the California hills. It sticks to their canyons and blankets Oso in a low mist that vanishes in the day and reappears around dusk. It’s the best time of year to catch a trophy bass. The time of year when they’re at their fattest.
It was so wet that when I tied up my wakebait (a 9” M.S. Slammer), I barely had to spit on the knot. I was throwing it on an 8 1⁄2 foot Dobyns samurai sword of a rod and 20lb copoly.
“With that kind of weaponry,” I said, “Oso won’t know what hit her,” walking towards the water, chanting, “Oso, Oso, Oso...,” in the dark.
“Oso.” Just before you reach it, there’s a fork in the road. Left leads to the bungalows, the dam, and the treeline in between; all good spots. But right leads towards the dock, the only spot on the lake that matters. It’s the reason I started fishing Oso three years ago, when I saw her for the first time. And it’s the reason I will continue to fish for her until I get her back. “Oso”.
I’ve controlled for all the variables. I track the water temp; I track what the trout are doing; and I know how the fish here respond to a wakebait, a glide, or a softbait. I know what they want and the way that they want it, the proper retrieve, cadence, and where to pause and just let it sit, before twitching it away from them again. I know all of this but she still won’t eat. But when I made my way to the end of the path and saw thedock, I knew it was only a matter of time. Soon, she’ll make up her mind.
It was a floating dock; old and wooden, with a four by six shanty shack hanging in the middle; a single floating line that pointed towards deep water. Angles-wise, there were a couple of ways to approach it. Casting from the dock itself, walking onto it, wastoo noisy. Unless you moved real slow, practically crawled on your hands and knees, it’d spook the fish. Best avoided. But casting from the bank wasn’t all that much prettier. I would have needed to throw overhead down past the end, and sit the Slammer two or three feet from the side of the wood. It was a fifty or sixty foot cast into an area the width of a basketball hoop. Doable, but risky.
I settled on a shorter side arm cast, positioned from the dock itself. I knew she would be on the end anyways. She would be in the shadow, where the food couldn’t see her, peering out into the light. So long as I was quiet, if I didn’t step hard or make the planks creak, she wouldn’t hear. Then I’d have one, maybe two shots to hit the right angle. After that, she’d get suspicious. I chose my move and began crawling down the planks.
On top of the dam, there’s a ranger’s cabin. His truck sits in a driveway overlooking the lake. A light came on through the cabin window; I’d watch the truck for signs of movement, I decided. The path down from the dam was a good winding mile away. Enough time to squat in some bushes.
I reached the middle of the dock, got up, and made my first cast past the end corner. It was a good cast. I waited for the ripples to settle before I started reeling. You could hear the water slapping on the tail of the wakebait, fifty feet off. When it reached the first corner of the dock, I gave it a twitch, an audible pop, then kept on reeling. Big wide V, halfway down the dock. Nothing. The second cast was where she stuck. She ate it right on the first corner, pinning it up against the wood, probably collecting some splinters along the way.
It was on. “Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up...” A swimbait fish is not the kind of fish that you play the drag on, best to lock it down all the way. Because the baits are so heavy, once you stick the fish, there’s a lot of weight it can throw around to pop the hook with. You’ve gotta lock down the drag, put a bend in the rod, and just keep reeling. It’s easier said than done. Three years ago, the nerves kicked in and I fumbled with reel handles. That’s how I lost her three years ago. So much time invested, all to have been foiled by 10-15 seconds of reeling, all for my fingers to slip on some cheap $5.99 grip! But this time I was prepared. I had new grips; and I knew my knot was good, and the hooks wouldn’t bend out.
By now, she was coming in hot. She was a 17 lb basketball; tail walking and head shaking; with eyes that bulged like cloudy marbles. Her back: ivy; her belly: pearls. It was Oso. Grotesque. Beautiful. The culmination of thousands of casts, of “just keep reelings” into one moment, “Keep reeling.” Keep reeling. Still reeling.
She was close enough for me to recognize that I had her pinned, double hooked in the bottom jaw. Go for the flip? Go for the flip. And so I flipped her up and she bounced down onto the dock and laid at my feet. I had to jump on top of her to make sure she didn’t fall back into the water, slime coat everywhere, “Oso.”
“Oso, Oso, Oso.” She looked 17 lbs. I popped the bronze gamakatsu hook out fromunder her tongue, she’d almost bent it out. I grabbed her by the jaw, and it all spread open. In the back of every bass’ mouth is a gullet and a pair of crushers. You can tell what they’ve been eating based upon the color of the crushers. Crawdads are tough and hard, so crawdad eaters’ crushers are a bloody bright red. But Oso’s crushers were light pink. She even had two trout tails sticking out of her gullet. The gullet, the trout tails, the crushers; if you held her jaw sideways they all opened up. The gullet opened up. The tails fell downwards. The crushers flopped out of the way; by the time I finished, they were bleeding.
A pair of headlights rounded the corner and came towards the dock. They settled on Oso and I. The ranger had arrived. The truck door fell open and he stepped out behind it, resting his hand on top of the roof. Complete stillness. Just looking on. It was a face-off, him and me, and the fish.
When I realized that I was, in fact, facing the ranger without my pants, I made a run for the shack behind me. I swear he was chasing me. He was chasing me as I ran butt-ass naked down the dock, bloody fish in hand, pants around my knees. And when I rounded the shack’s corner, rather than get blood on my pants, I threw the fish back into the water. No measurements, no pictures, no proof. She was only 12 lbs anyways. Then I was able to pull up my pants with both hands. She was just a fish story now.
“It’s private property!”
“I hear you,” I yelled from the backside of the shack. “Just wait for me to get my shit together.”
The ranger didn’t care. He came right around the corner anyways. He told me that he was going to write me up for trespassing, and if I didn’t cooperate he’d have no problems calling the cops. He said that he was going to drive me out himself. I offered to hike back out, but he said that I couldn’t be trusted on my own. “Okay.” Then he mentioned the fact that if I ever came back, he would certainly call the cops, on the spot, without a second thought. “Shiit.”
I put my rod in the back of his truck and we drove east towards the end of the canyon; up, up, and up out of the hole. Fields of yellow-bulbed mustard plants replaced scrub-brush; their thin stems bobbed in the truck’s wake. The rangers clock glowed 4:43am. It was dead quiet, no words, just the sound of the engine, wheels on gravel, and the mustard plant bouncing off the front hood.
When we reached high ground but were still far enough away from the gate, the ranger stopped the truck.
“I thought we were going back out?” He didn’t respond. “I thought you were gonna drive me to the gate.”
“I am,” he muttered, pausing. “I’m just thinking about whether or not I’m going to write that ticket up for you.”
“What?”
“I said, maybe I don’t have to write that ticket up,” he continued
“Okay... Why?” I was genuinely confused.
Then he told me what I would have to do.
Mustard plant covers the high parts of most of the California hills. Unperturbed, it grows in dense fields of waving green and yellow. When I was a kid, we’d run around in those fields playing kick the can or building forts. And when we got tired, we’d lay down and snack on the stems. The stem is the best part. You can tell what time of year it is based upon the taste of the stem. In spring, they’re sweet. But the later in the year it gets, the more the stems dry out and the flowers turn brown, before they fall to the ground come October or so. Even by the middle of Summer, the stems adopt a sort of alcoholic, tangy quality. By then, they’re pretty much inedible.
It was this same taste that I had in my mouth when the truck started up again. It smelled like blood and mustard; Budlight and cheap deodorant; cigarettes and asscrack. I looked out the window and away, “No wonder you work at The Boyscout Lake,” I told him. He didn’t think it was funny.
Eventually, we reached the front gate. He pulled into the culdesac just outsideand stopped the truck. “Where you off to? I can drop you where you need to go.”
“I’m good. My van’s right there.”
“Wait, seriously? That thing’s yours?” He had seen it before.
The van had been parked there for the past three years. It never left its spot other than for groceries, and trips to the tackle shop. And as I stepped out of the truck all I could think about was whether or not I was going to come back the next day. The ranger had said that the moment he saw me back there, he was calling the cops. I still could’ve gone back though; it had taken them three years to catch me in the first place. But three years! Three years is a long time. But then again, no. It was Oso.